Sharing Communication Resources

There has never been a more significant time to pull together. Especially when we need to be creative in the way we teach and deliver communication skills training. Why re-invent the wheel, though, if we don’t have to? If we can share communication teaching resources online with each other, this has to be helpful, right?

One organisation that is trying to help achieve this objective is the International Association of Communication in Healthcare. I have been a member of this organisation for about four years now. You can read about the organisation by using this link:  https://each.international/about-us/

“EACH exists to provide an academic and practical professional community to those involved in investigating and improving communication in healthcare. Through EACH, researchers, educators, practitioners, and policymakers share their expertise to understand and enhance communication between health care providers, patients, and their families.”

If you have looked at my website, you will see that this organisation is a good fit for me. I sit on the teaching committee of EACH. There are about 35 of us in total. We meet twice a year to work on projects and support new and existing communication skills teaching ventures. Of course, this means sharing teaching resources and expertise. We were due to meet in Vienna a couple of weeks ago for our annual spring meeting. Instead, 26 of us (from different countries) met online via the delights of zoom.

Sharing communication teaching resources

Overwhelmingly, there was a consensus that we needed to help our nurses and doctors and other healthcare professionals. Additionally, many of our educators are switching from face to face teaching and delivering training online, which is not without its challenges. Therefore, we decided to collect and share teaching or other useful resources that we could make available to them on the EACH website without becoming a member of EACH. You can access resources here and upload any communication-related resources you think might be helpful to others: https://each.international/resources/covid-19/

Here are some resources that I am aware of that might be helpful to some of you.

1. Health Education England has developed a list of short courses to help healthcare professionals, specifically about COVID-19https://portal.e-lfh.org.uk/Catalogue/Index?HierarchyId=0_45016&programmeId=45016
2. I was involved in a project with NHS England and NHS Improvements to develop a tool kit to help doctors in primary care deliver online consultations. A number of you will be doing this now during the COVID-19 pandemic so I hope you can take something useful from this link: https://www.england.nhs.uk/gp/digital-first-primary-care/
3. A list of resources to support medical simulation training: https://www.healthysimulation.com/medical-simulation/covid-19-resources/
4. The UK Oncology Nursing Society has pulled together a list of useful resources with Macmillan: https://ukons.org/news-events/resources-for-tacking-covid-19-in-oncology/

Like many of us, COVID-19 took me by surprise. I was in the process of developing some online training courses. For one reason or another, I have fallen behind in completing them. What I can do though, is write some blogs which I hope will be useful to you.